Monday, June 30, 2008

Thanks to B'tselem, the anti-occupation Israeli human rights group, and the BBC, its plight has at last been exposed on mainstream western media. Last year B'tselem established the Shooting Back project which provides Palestinians with video cameras, allowing them to capture on film the harassment and attacks regularly meted out by settlers. The footage shown on BBC was of a brutal baseball-bat assault by four masked men on a shepherd and his family. The attackers are believed to be from the Susiya settlement. It was by no means the first attack of its kind. Many who saw the BBC video have been shocked, but for those who know this part of Palestine the only shock is that it has been shown at all. For some years international and Israeli human rights groups have been supporting Palestinian farmers and their families in the South Hebron Hills.It is impossible not to be impressed by the skilled work that we have witnessed in recent weeks.Wedding in Susiya

A German mediator ran between Israel and Hezbollah; an Egyptian mediator came and went between Hamas and the government of Israel. A taboo subject was broken and oaths evaporated. It appears that the official agreement between Israel and Hezbollah on how prisoners and captives will be exchanged will be signed today.....There is no way to avoid the conclusion that Israel prefers the current framework. Negotiating with groups may appear to be a concession, but this is far from being the case. Israel is releasing prisoners of the kind that it can arrest any day, but it is not being asked to relinquish territory. It shakes a hand - indirectly, of course - with Hamas, and grants it the authority of a state and political standing that it refused the group when it was elected in free elections in 2006. But Israel is not required to recognize Hamas. It could have released prisoners earlier and handed them over to Mahmoud Abbas as part of the Road Map. But then, alas, this would have been perceived to be a political achievement of Abbas before he did anything for Israel. Preferring Hamas and Hezbollah

Mohammed Omer, the Gaza correspondent of IPS, and joint winner of the 2008 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, was strip-searched at gunpoint, assaulted and abused by Israeli security officials at the Allenby border crossing between Jordan and the West Bank on Thursday as he tried to return home to Gaza.Israelis Assault Award Winning IPS Journalist

Death is often a good career move in poetry. No sooner are the obsequies over and the baked meats eaten than the publisher warms up the presses for a definitive edition of the collected poems, solemnly proofread down to the last querulous comma. Yet not all poets are well served by such an exhaustive volume, which may seal up a reputation forever — indeed, such a book has sometimes been called a tombstone. A collected poems may be cruelest to a poet whose genius shone as intermittently as a firefly. Urban Poet